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There be none of Beauty's daughters, Op 24 No 1

Recordings

The eagerly awaited Hyperion debut of Alice Coote, one of the most distinctive mezzos of her generation, who together with the indefatigable Graham Johnson explores love in its many manifestations in a pageant of English song and poetry that inclu ...» More

Details

There be none of Beauty’s daughters
With a magic like thee;
And like music on the waters
Is thy sweet voice to me:
When, as if it sound were causing
The charmed ocean’s pausing,
The waves lie still and gleaming
And the lull’d winds seem dreaming:

And the midnight moon is weaving
Her bright chain o’er the deep;
Whose breast is gently heaving,
As an infant’s asleep:
So the spirit bows before thee,
To listen and adore thee;
With a full but soft emotion,
Like the swell of Summer’s ocean.

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

There is something about the gentle music of Roger Quilter, Albion’s Reynaldo Hahn perhaps, that appears to embody those national qualities of grace and reticence that are valued from afar as being typically English. His popularity in America is undimmed, also among young singers, but at home he is rather taken for granted (the same may be said for Hahn, who seems unimportant to the French but is adored in English-speaking lands). One of Quilter’s strengths is that he never shirked from setting the great poets—his Shakespeare settings are among his best, as are his To Julia songs to the poetry of Herrick.

There be none of Beauty’s daughters, from the poem by Lord Byron (1788–1824), is the least known of the three Quilter songs on this disc, although it comes from the same Op 24 set as the celebrated Go, lovely rose; it takes its musical cue from the line ‘music on the waters’. Quilter writes a quietly undulating song where the piano-writing laps gently around the vocal line, steering the melody here and there to enchanting effect. It is dedicated to the tenor Roland Hayes, the first black singer from America to tour Europe as a recitalist in the early 1920s.